Skip to main content

All The Bloody Shakespeare - Twelfth Night

It is at least better than First Knight.

While reading Twelfth Night, I discovered that the insult toss-pot is a middle-English phrase for a drunk.

The etymology of which is that beer was served in ceramic pots which the "toss-pots" would throw backwards as they glugged. And not, as I have always assumed, that it was some kind of archaic vessel for the catchment of masturbatory issue.

So there you have it, I have been using the insult wrong for the majority of my life. And, it is not nearly as insulting as I thought.

Twelfth night is thankfully the last of Shakespeare 's comedies before the "problem plays" begin. And it's fine, there's a lot of thinly veiled knob jokes, the usual cross-dressing and a standard clown. If you plan on reading it, probably best not to read all the other comedies in a row because these tropes do get wearing.

3/5 It's fine.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

All the Bloody Shakespeare: The Merry Wives of Windsor

Not this clever! I wouldn't be the first person to point out that this play has some things in common with Allo Allo.  Outrageous foreign accents, a plump libidinous protagonist (Falstaff) embroiled in a farce of misunderstandings and unseen comeuppances.   Nor would I be the first person to notice that it's just God awful. There is a list of ardent bardophiles who have condemned the play.  Being a natural contrarian I had been hoping to prove them wrong, but they're right on this one.  It has all the hallmarks of bad Shakespeare comedy (animal jokes, xenophobia, flat characterisation and misogyny) without any of the clever prose. It's the worst. Allo Allo is self-aware, the Brits get as much of a roasting as the Germans and French.  That's not really the case in Merry Wives, which takes more of an It Ain't Half Hot Mum approach (though, it has to be said, nowhere near as offensive).  But, you say, Shakespeare was way ahead of his time doing funny acce...
Post a Comment
Read more

Going to work is just awful

See, Bukowski gets it. I've just seen the #thingsIwillmissaboutlockdownhashtag trending.  So, I'll say this, I will miss not having to go to work. Look, I know people have it bad.   This Covid-19 thing is kicking the world’s economy right in the ass and taking down a lot of good people, both physically and financially.   And yes, this post is coming from a place of privilege; because, if I were about to miss a meal I know I’d be happy to get back to work.   Over the years, I’ve done some pretty humiliating stuff to make ends meet: from cleaning bottles of piss left by workmen on construction sites to lining up at an agency at 4am in the hope they might send me out for the day.   Thankfully, that’s all a while behind me, and right now, in a usual year, I would be marking exams for 14 hours a day seven days a week to top up my meagre teaching wage. So, let’s be honest, work is shit.   The average person with an average job, on average, earns below the a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Flash Fiction: The Words and the Nausea

A theory gaining some ground in the scientific community is that the whole universe is an artificial creation, like a computer game or the Matrix. There are, apparently, lines of code in the fabric of the universe that make this a dead give away (philosophically speaking).  The chances are that we all live in some cosmological playpen, like the Holodeck in Star Trek the Next Generation. And, yes the holograms became sentien t and have started to kill each other. The truly terrifying aspect of this concept is not that the thought that all life is meaningless and without purpose, or even that all of our suffering (the one thing we can truly hold sacrosanct) is for nothing. The truly terrifying aspect is the thought that I may have become stuck on the second level, got bored and spent my whole life playing the mini-games. None of this really concerned me much until one day as I was on my way to Tesco, I saw the evidence of it. In giant twelve-foot letters, covering both cloud and vapo...
Post a Comment
Read more